Mozilla sics sea monster on SunSpider and Google V8

Mozilla has unveiled a new browser benchmark, claiming that – more so than the likes of SunSpider and Google's V8 – it focuses on "realistic" workloads and "forward looking" applications. The open sourcers call their new benchmark Kraken, which makes for a convenient headline for the blog post announcing its arrival.

"Release the Kraken," the post reads. "We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward. These are the things that people are saying are too slow to do with open web technologies today, and we want to have benchmarks that reflect progress against making these near-future apps universally available."

The latest version of the new benchmark is available here, and naturally, it's free and open source. But Mozilla's Robert Sayre points out that this is just a starting point. "Kraken will evolve quickly over the coming weeks and months as we build out its test suite and continue to push forward the capabilities of the open Web, as we make the workloads more realistic and varied," he says.

According to Mozilla's latest tests, the Firefox 4.0 beta is two and a half times faster than Firefox 3.6 on Kraken 1.0. ®